Advertising in the computer industry makes it vyer easy to know the giants: Dell, IBM, Apple, Sony, and HP.  But, in the gaming industry, just like the skateboarding industry, advertising is not prevalent for two main reasons: lack of funding and it’s just not cool to go mainstream.  In a market of underground or word-of-mouth, it is not easy to find a suitable gaming system with a reliable warranty service. 

Gaming systems are choc-full of high-performance components, such as dual-head 512MB video cards, Quad core duo processors, high-end motherboards with multiple cooling systems.  Basically, imagine a regular Dell computer and multiply the performance by 5 times and quantities of 4 for every part supplied.  So, the support for these systems are more important than a common computer because the maxed out components are more inclined to fail or need tweaking.

For gaming systems, Dell does make them in the XPS 720.  However, although we are big Dell fans, we immediately reject their gaming product line as several of their gaming machines bought for clients froze, crashed, or were slow, and needed to be recalled for refunds.  Alienware is another well-known gaming system.  We have had good results with them, but their compuer support system was very lax with replacements.  HP and Sony are also starting to produce gaming machines albeit it is not their specialty and we would wait awhile until we hear consistent performance results.

Our winner among the masses of gaming systems is Xi Computer Corp.  They have been consistently reviewed as the best gaming machine and highest performance machine by PC World and CNET.  Tests have shown that Xi is the fastest computer out there.  It may be used as a gaming system, but has also been touted as the higher performer for Autocad software, a demanding application that requires multiple layers of processing and rendering.  What really impressed us is their warranty support model.  Just last week at 4PM we called up Xi for replacing a failed motherboard.  We were on the phone for all of 3 minutes and after proving the RAM and hard drive are okay, they authorized a motherboard replacement.  In 4 minutes, we were emailed a form to fax over for us to authorize we will send back the failed motherboard or be charged for the new one they’re sending.  Hey, the motherboard costs almost $700 so they have to be sure they’re not sending a free part.  We faxed it back and got the new motherboard by 9AM the next morning!   Amazing!  No 3-5 business days - instant gratification indeed.  The new motherboard was replaced and the system works like a charm again.  For their performance and top warranty support, Xi is now our favorite high-end gaming machine.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.